Fragrance Quotes
Verified quotations about scent, with sources, context and links into the Fragrance Library. Each quote needs two independent sources; single-source lines are credited, and lines we could not trace are listed separately.
Scent and Memory
- Helen Keller on Smell and Memory
- Proust on Scent and Memory
- Oliver Wendell Holmes on Smell and Memory
- Ackerman on the Memory of Smell
- Ackerman on Smell and the Brain
- Shelley on Odours and Memory
- Kipling on Smell and Memory
- Who Wrote “Smells Are Surer Than Sounds or Sights”?
Poets and Playwrights
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 5 and Summer’s Distillation
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 54 and the Rose’s Odour
- Shakespeare on Cleopatra’s Perfumed Barge
- Shakespeare on a Bank of Violets
- Whitman on Perfume and Open Air
- Keats on Fragrance in Darkness
- Milton on Sabean Odours
- Pope on Arabia in a Dressing-Table Box
- Baudelaire on the Perfume Flask
- Song of Songs on Ointments and Spices
- Catullus on a Perfume Worth Begging For
- Jane Eyre: Sweet-Briar and a Cigar
Philosophers, Essayists and Ancients
- Nietzsche: My Genius Is in My Nostrils
- Rousseau on Smell and Imagination
- Pliny the Elder on Perfume and Luxury
- Theophrastus on Odours and Mixture
- Oscar Wilde on the Psychology of Perfumes
- Huysmans on the Art of Perfume
- Dickinson on Essential Oils and Attar of Rose
- Piesse on the Octave of Odours
- Süskind on the Power of Odors
- Süskind: Scent Is a Brother of Breath
Icons and Modern Voices
- What Marilyn Monroe Said About Chanel No. 5
- Andy Warhol on Smell and the Past
- Andy Warhol’s Three-Month Perfume Rule
- Coco Chanel: Wherever One Wants to Be Kissed
Myth-Busters and Corrections
- Napoleon and the Don’t-Wash Letter
- Cleopatra’s Perfumed Sails: Plutarch and Shakespeare
- Perfume Quotes We Could Not Verify
More reading: The History of Perfume · Browse the Fragrance Library · Beyoncé on Fragrance